Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung
July 3, 1965
[SOURCE: Long Live Mao Tse-tung Thought, a Red Guard Publication.]
Students are heavily loaded [with work] and their health suffers. Their study therefore becomes useless. [I] suggest a cut of one third of their total activities [work]. Please ask representatives of staff and students to discuss this problem a few times, take decisions, and carry them out. Please consider whether this is feasible.
The next few decades will be precious and important for the future of our country and the destiny of mankind. The twenty-years-old [of today] will be forty or fifty in twenty or thirty years’ time. This generation of young people will take part in building our ‘poor and bare’ country into a great strong socialist power and will fight and bury imperialism with their own hands. The task is arduous and the road long. Chinese young people of lofty ambitions must dedicate their lives to the accomplishment of our great historic mission! And for this, people of our generation must determine to fight hard for the rat of their lives!
Politics must follow the mass line. It will not do to rely on leaders alone. How can the leaders do so much? The leaders can cope with only a fraction of everything, good and bad. Consequently, everybody must be mobilized to share the responsibility, to speak up, to encourage other people, and to criticize other people. Everyone has a pair of eyes and a mouth and he must be allowed to see and speak up. Democracy means allowing the masses to manage their own affairs. Here are two ways: one is to depend on a few individuals and the other is to mobilize the masses to manage affairs. Our politics is mass politics. Democratic rule is the rule of all, not the rule of a few. Everyone must be urged to open his mouth. He has a mouth, therefore he has two responsibilities to eat and to speak. He must speak up wherever he sees bad things or bad styles of work. He must follow his duty to fight.
Nothing can be done well, if it depends entirely on the leader not on the leadership of the party. [We] must rely on the party and [our] comrades to deal with matters, not on a solitary leader. An active leader followed by inactive masses will not do; it must be established as a practice that the masses use both their hands and their mouths. The only way to have things done well is to depend on the leadership of the party from above and [the support of] the masses from below.